The Formula
By Meagan (moirariordan)

This was written for the Songficathon Part Deux at Degrassi Boards. My song was Flowing by 311.

HANDS
Dad had large hands with a huge class ring from his alma mater on his right middle finger. There was hair on his knuckles and a scar on his palm from when he slipped with a kitchen knife six years ago. When he was little, he remembered sitting on Dad’s lap, taking his big hand with his two small ones, running his fingers along the rough, callused skin, matching palms, comparing the size and texture of Craig vs. Daddy. Those hands healed people, he knew. Dad would come home and say things like, I saved Mrs. Barrett’s life today, or I gave Mr. Mackenzie a new heart today. Those hands were the ones that bandaged his knees and ruffled his hair, threw softballs and picked him up when he fell. Those hands that grabbed his before crossing streets, taught him how to shave and tie a tie.

Later after Mom left, he stopped sitting in Dad’s lap, and by then he could cross streets by himself. Then Dad got the demotion from surgery into geriatric, and he stopped saying things about his patients. Then one day he accidentally left a red shirt in with his Dad’s white load, and those hands became dangerous. They were things to avoid.

On the last day he saw Dad alive, it was at that pretentious restaurant downtown, and when he got there, he was tapping his hands on the table. The whole time, he watched those hands, they handed him the plane ticket and played with the tablecloth and threw the napkin away with disgust. Then, outside, those hands turned into fists (with that damn ring) and became dangerous again, clenched white and red.

During his funeral, Craig held Joey’s hand. When the absurdity became too much, he used it to wrench Craig out of the seat, down the aisle, out of the church with the ridiculous words and empty sentiments. He tore away from Joey, leaning up against the stone steps, bending down to rest his hands on his knees, the laughter pouring out of him.

“Craig. Craig!” Joey standing there, alarmed. “Craig, stop.”

“What?” Craig laughed more, standing up straight. “Why the hell should I?” He held his hands out in front of him, studying the shape and texture. The welt on his cheek stung.

“He’s your father.”

Father. Dad. Softballs. Hospitals. Vacations.

“Is he?”

tick tick tick the clock bludgeons your mind
endlessly replaying times that were unkind

HEART
When Mom left, she told him that her heart would always be here, with him. Craig imagined a small, pulsing red beam of light hovering around him, protecting him. That didn’t last long, though.

When Angie was born, Dad let him go to see her once, in the hospital, and he stood at the window next to Mom, watching this small creature wiggle around in her small crib. He didn’t understand why this small thing was so important, but he loved the way Mom smiled when she looked at her, at this Angela thing, and so he gave her the red light to keep. “You can have it,” he whispered. “You need it more.”

When Mom died, he thought the red light went out. He lay on his bed for hours, trying to conjure the image of it, but failed every time. It was gone. It’d been weakening ever so slowly, but now it had vanished. He found himself mourning for the loss of his comfort rather than his mother. It only solidified the notion that he never deserved a mother in the first place anyway.

He went to an expensive private school that he hated, and one day another boy named Antonio (“Call me Tony, ese,”) took him aside and sold him a cigarette for three dollars and a lunch pass. That night, after Dad got called in for surgery, he sat hanging out of his window and smoked it, watching the bright red tip glow in the night. He coughed and hacked and hated it, but he smoked the entire thing. He knew that Mom would’ve hated it.

Then when he tried to buy more, Antonio/Tony upped the price, and Craig punched him in the nose. He would’ve been expelled but Dad pulled him out instead just in time, and instead of the red of a cigarette, he watched the red of his knuckles, split and bleeding. The red, hand-shaped print on his arm, slowly turning purple. Then he thought he might be a little crazy.

Then one day, he was walking home from school and a bus pulled up and stopped half a block down. Little kids poured out of it, and there was one little girl with curly brown hair and big eyes that the others called “Angie.” Craig looked closer, and there was a faint tinge of red on her clothes and in her footprints. Then he blinked and it was gone.

He watched her get off the bus for three days before actually speaking to her, afraid that she would get scared. He needn’t have worried.

“Are you Craig?”

He bent down and smiled, the first real one in a while. “Yeah, how’d you know?”

“My dad has pictures of you and Mommy.”

“Wow, that’s great. Did he tell you that we’re related?”

“Yeah, you’re my brother!”

Her smile was bright and she looked so much like Mom. “Yes, I am.”

if somebody cares then there is no way you can tell
cursed consciousness it's your private hell

NOSE
Joey’s kitchen smelled like burnt coffee. Every morning would be a mad bustle to get out the door, start the day, Angie to daycare, Craig to school, Joey to work, all by eight, go, go now, now! Joey would try every single day to remember to take the coffee off the burner in time, but every day he’d get sidetracked, so the acrid, swampy smell of burnt java would invade the small kitchen and living room, lingering even until Craig would return home every day.

Joey’s garage smelled like mothballs, musty and old on the couch, and motor oil, stained on the cement floor from a long ago old car. Craig didn’t care, he filled it up with old Christmas lights and guitars and a cheap drum set he bought for forty bucks. Ash liked to light scented candles and whenever Hazel would come to watch Jimmy practice, she brought small Glad scented plug-ins, so it became a strange waxy mix of old car exhaust and Burst of Springtime.

Joey himself always smelled of bad cologne, either the stuff he wore or the stuff that rubbed off from his customers. When he cooked dinner though, he smelled like chicken broth or spaghetti sauce or whatever it was that he attempted to cook, most of it burnt. And it was such a change from the perfectly prepared dinners, gourmet recipes and no mistakes or else of his father’s house, so Craig didn’t mind much.

Once he asked why Joey didn’t just order out all the time, after a frantic kitchen fire and a near miss with the fire department. Joey just grinned and snorted jokingly. “So not the same,” he replied.

Craig picked at the lasagna, burnt black and stuck to the pan, but much more delicious than anything else he’d ever tasted, and it was times like those when he dared to think the word family. “You’re right.”

the more it will spin the more that I try
to stop my mind flowing

MOUTH
Ash had an amazing mouth. Small and perfect and Craig loved to watch her talk. He especially loved to stop her talking with a kiss, loved to catch her off guard and throw her off balance. It was amazing, how tightly reined she kept herself, always checking to make sure that no one glimpsed anything that she didn’t want them to, and it became almost a game for him to catch her unawares.

He’d watched her silently for a long time before he dated her, and he was practically in awe of her. She was so genuinely real, physically incapable of being anything other than herself, and it was mystifying. So different than the girls at his old private school, whose big rebellions were shortening their skirts six centimeters higher than regulation length. He tracked her metamorphosis, watched her from half a step back as she tried different styles, different attitudes, different skins, fascinated. He gravitated towards her, hoping that maybe comfortable individuality was catching. Dad was gone, she helped him realize. It didn’t matter if Dad hated rock music, he could play the guitar freely now. He didn’t have to force himself to stay interested in photography, he lived with Joey. Joey wanted him to be happy, not respectable.

But her expressions were all in the mouth, he learned. When she was happy or angry or sad it wasn’t the eyes or brow that gave her away, it was the tilt and angle of her mouth. A small, quirky smile meant she liked whatever it was he was saying or doing, and downward turned corners meant she didn’t. Then the words that poured out of that mouth were his undoing—whether they were sappy words, love-soaked words, angry, hurt, bitter words—whatever she said, he listened, always.

They ran the gamut, from the ultra-good to the spectacularly horrible, and later he wondered if they weren’t some kind of training ground for each other, testing the waters of every possible emotion in order to experience every type of human relationship. Either way, he looked back on those long afternoons browsing record stores and fiddling around in kitchens and garages with smiles and content nostalgia. What they lacked in maturity and experience they made up in forgiveness, and really does it matter all that much how happy the ending is if you learn so much from the story?

go away sun I’m not prepared for you today
it seems you are it seems you are

EYES
Manny’s eyes were big and brown and open, and when she looked at him it was like she was pleading with him to do something, to move, to protect, to save her. That first date, oh-so-many years ago those eyes had filled with tears, then quickly blinked them away as she turned and ran in the opposite direction. She was always so small and quiet, but the thing he missed was that her eyes were always open, watching and waiting—for what, he couldn’t ever decide.

Maybe it was the mess with Ash that drew him back to her, anyway. He watched that damn video, saw her mistake broadcasted for the whole world to see and he remembered what she looked like when she cried, knew intimately the expression she wore when she hurt. “You were my biggest mistake,” he’d told her, and meant it, because she seemed so happy before he got to her. So touchable. So attainable.

But somewhere along the way she lost that tinge of innocence that had repelled/attracted him, and gained an edge of something harder, not manipulation exactly, but convenient exploitation, maybe. Whatever it was it was dark and it didn’t sit right at the bottom of his stomach, but it was thrilling. He felt it when he touched her, tasted it on his tongue, and he wondered if it wasn’t unlike the adrenaline rush that comes with shoplifting or getting away with a lie.

She was a drug, he realized. One that he willingly took, admittedly, but he looked into the future and saw no dark haired children, no summer weddings. He knew consciously that he had just as long of a history with her as he had with Ash, a bumpy history littered with broken promises and dead babies, but a history, nonetheless. Yet he also knew that Memories Of Ash overshadowed Memories Of Manny, something that he really should start getting around to feeling guilty about.

She liked to keep her eyes open when she kissed him, sometimes, and every once in awhile he’d pull back and find her watching him. He thought that maybe she could see everything he couldn’t, could look right through him and see everything he would do to her. Hurt her more. And he would, he knew it, he couldn’t help it. Yet he kept coming back, and he didn’t want to know why.

He thinks about the complexities and complications between men and women, wonders if it was worth it, really. Because the Memories Of Ash were so much clearer still than even the girl sitting in his lap, and he hated that this girl would always be second best. And the worst of all, he wondered whether he hated it because she had to settle or because he did.

along the way to close my eyes
I lost where I was going

EARS
Ellie grew into his life like she’d always belonged and it was him that was just slow on the uptake. He was kind of bemused by her presence at first, and then he promptly gave up trying to figure her out because frankly, it was too daunting a task for a guy such as him.

He loved to listen to her speak. He sat in group, heard her talk about how good things were going and how her mom was so much better and she missed her dad but she still hadn’t cut for two years and it was mostly bullshit but he paid attention anyway. Then afterwards they’d usually walk to The Dot and grab coffee or burgers and fries and have pinball contests. Or go to the record store and fight over music genres or grab Angie and go to the park and pretend that they were German tourists and scare the soccer moms, and it was all so easy.

He had to laugh around her, he couldn’t help it. Had to smile, laugh, grin, whatever, because all that emotion had to go somewhere, and Ellie made laughing easy. He really didn’t think anything of the fact that he hugged her so much, or how casual it was when he tickled her or they had stupid slapping contests or how he gave her his coat when she forgot hers. It wasn’t supposed to be a thing, you know, something for Jimmy and Marco to raise eyebrows at and for Manny to get jealous over, it was just…Ellie. He couldn’t really figure out how to describe her, exactly. All these descriptive words bouncing around in his head from his songs—none of them fit. Sure she was clever and smart and pretty and funny and warm and sophisticated and blah blah boring, but most of all she was just Ellie. Just…just Ellie. That’s it.

He didn’t know exactly when she switched from acquaintance to friend to best friend to shit, everything, but he was damn grateful that she took the time to bother. He forgot to tell her sometimes, but he always remembered to be thankful that she was always just there with calm logic and solid reasoning. And he always worried that he wasn’t enough, always kind of anticipated the day when she woke up and realized what a tool he was, but it never came, so he just sort of closed his eyes and went with it, hoping for the best.

It was those hours he’d spend on the phone with her, though, after he left for Vancouver and she graduated. He’d sit on this long, wraparound porch of the house that he was staying in on the huge cordless that was some kind of 80’s leftover and describe to her everything that he saw/experienced/heard/did/would do, and she just listened so brilliantly. He’d never met anyone who listened so carefully, who didn’t just hear words but feelings and motivations, who heard what he wasn’t saying just as loudly as what he was. She heard people, not sentences.

Like, “Joey’s been really depressed lately,” he’d say.

“You miss Caitlin,” she’d reply. “Just call her, tell her about the studio deal, she’d be thrilled.”

Or, “I had that dream about Ash’s dad’s wedding again.”

And she’d come back with, “Angie’s just a little freaked out still, she’ll come around.”

It was mind boggling.

The best part was that there was no bullshit, no posturing or lying or covering or putting on airs of any kind whatsoever, it was just her and him. Ellie and Craig, and it was so refreshing and real and natural. And he didn’t even have to analyze it, because it didn’t matter, it just was. He felt like he was on the edge of something huge, some kind of revelation on the tip of his tongue just barely out of his grasp whenever he was around her, yet he didn’t feel the urge to catch it, he knew that it would come on time, for once.

“I wish you were here,” she said. “This town lost whatever cool factor it had when it lost you and Marco.”

“It still has you,” he replied. “You could make Memphis cool by stepping foot in it.”

Then she laughed and call him a dork, and then he thought, this is it. This is my life. “I cannot believe you just called Memphis uncool. It’s the home of Elvis, you nonbeliever!”

He thought he was finally okay with that.

you can't be let down if you don't expect the world
expect to lay awake there by your sleeping girl
along the way to close my eyes

Fin

This turned out…weird. Huh.